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Your Daily Posterous Spaces Update October 18th, 2011
Mountain biking in Canada Posted 2 days ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
For a mountain biking break you can't do better than the stunning terrain of British Columbia, the sport's spiritual home
"I thought we'd start with Thirsty Beaver, definitely take in Steam Donkey and Space Nugget, and perhaps if there's time we can check out Bucket of Blood. Did you bring your dodgeballs?"
Hauling his mountain bike out of the back of his truck, guide Mike Manara set off through the steaming Canadian drizzle towards the first creek crossing of the day, leaving me desperately searching for my ? how can I put this ? balls. I would find these homemade cakes much later on, gently oozing chocolate and peanuts between the bike tools in my backpack, a casualty of being thrown around a network of trails the collective naming of which sounded more like the latter stages of some gruesome illness than a fun day out on a bike.
"Nine years ago there were no riders in Cumberland," said Mike over lunch, a hastily arranged tree stump picnic stop well away from the bear poo we had spotted earlier. "But now the car park at the rec centre is full every weekend with people coming to mountain bike and that's great."
It's not an overstatement to say that British Columbia is mountain biking. The region on Canada's west coast has passionately nurtured both the sport's champions and its evolution, even giving the name to a particular genre of riding known as "north shore" (elevated wooden trails which act as bridges and launches for jumps), which was born on the northern shore of Vancouver's harbour. Travel up the Sea to Sky highway for 70 miles and you reach the behemoth of Whistler, a mountain resort which has invested so enthusiastically in its mountain biking infrastructure that it attracts 250,000 people a year into its purpose-built park and trails.
Cumberland lacks all of Whistler's sass and advertising savvy, an acute failing about which the small town is entirely unconcerned. It lies on Vancouver Island's east coast in an area known as the Comox Valley, 25 minutes south of Mount Washington ? another major outdoor sports destination.
From its founding in 1888 until its mines closed in 1966, Cumberland was a busy coal-producing town ? complete with bitter labour disputes and a reputation for hard living among its inhabitants which earned it the nickname Dodge City.
It is on this industrial heritage that the United Riders of Cumberland have gradually developed a network of trails, utilising the old logging tracks ? on Steam Donkey you can even feel the old sleepers underneath your wheels ? which surround the town.
"When I arrived 10 years ago there was nothing," said Jeremy Grasby, whose opening of the Riding Fool Hostel spearheaded Cumberland's transformation from dying community into sporting destination. "I mean, we're talking tumbleweed blowing across the street, you know?
"I don't know why I came here. I just love mountain biking and I love mountain bikers so it seemed to make sense. I had no grand plan, just open the place and see how it goes."
The hostel took over a 19th-century building that had for three generations been a hardware store belonging to CH Tarbell and sons, the original signage for which now hangs in the living room. Lodgers are diverse: we entered to find a chairlift operator at Mount Washington, full of youthful seasonaire glee, sitting on one sofa, while poring over a map were three fortysomethings pondering whether their UK-honed cycling skills were going to be enough for the terrain. Bikes stood in the hallway ? the Dodge City Cycles (dodgecitycycles.com ) shop shares the building and mountain bike magazines were weighing down most of the tables. The hostel works in conjunction with Island Mountain Rides to organise guided rides for visitors both in the immediate area and further afield. It's fair to say that two wheels rule at the Riding Fool.
Most of the trails ? many of which you can ride straight from the hostel's front door ? are single track, hand built by people living locally, giving each one a story and a character of its own. Thirsty Beaver weaved through wet, lush forest, the creation of a group known as the River Rats ? chaps on the mature side of 50 with time on their hands and a love of carpentry, hence the beaver totempoles which dot the route and the expansive use of wooden bridges.
Three hours after surviving Bucket of Blood (a tree? a corner? oh no!), we were propping up the bar at the Waverley Hotel, where Pink Floyd tribute band the Pigs were inching their way through Dark Side of the Moon. The ceiling was pockmarked with wine corks and dry ice curled around the bike that swung gently from the rafters. Behind the bar was a glass door leading to the walk-in refrigerator which also served the off?licence next door.
Cumberland's main street, Dunsmuir Avenue, plays host to an eclectic mix of businesses from coffee shops and tattoo parlours to organic bakeries and vintage clothing stores. It's all a far cry from the adventurous terrain which surrounds the town and the rowdy history which the modern incarnation has inherited.
The following day Mike decided we needed to explore the riding in Strathcona Provincial Park , up on the Forbidden Plateau, so called because of the legend of the disappearance of women and children from the Comox tribe who were hiding there to escape raiders. It was a long and dusty slog to the start of the trails, but as we ascended, the view over to the mainland dulled the pain enough to suspend the use of bad language. We were heading for a trail named Cabin Fever which, as soon as we turned off from the fireroad ascent, was nothing short of extraordinary. Cresting bare rock outcrops with wide open vistas, we dived into dappled forest runs ending on tight, sandy corners twisting through low shrubbery. We rode back to Mike's truck on Bear Bait, a brilliantly mischievous trail which ducked over and under splayed tree roots, suitable for any rider with a sense of fun.
"I think you've earned a Lucky," said Mike before dumping a 15-can pack of Lucky Lager on the truck bed. Such is the enthusiasm with which the residents of Cumberland consume this brand of lager that it was named the Luckiest town in Canada in 2002 with more cans sold there than anywhere else in the country. Not bad going for a population of 2,800 people.
"There has been mountain biking here since mountain biking began," said Jeremy later. "I guess we are lucky ? the riding is phenomenal but we also have that smalltown community feel. There's everything you need."
And you're going to need those dodgeballs.
? The Riding Fool Hostel (2705 Dunsmuir, +1 250 336 8250, ridingfool.com) has dorm beds for C$25.75pp (?15) and doubles for ?45. Island Mountain Rides (islandmountainrides.com ) runs half?day tours from ?45pp and full?day epic rides from ?60pp. For more information, visit britishcolumbia.travel * Cycling holidays
* Canada
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* Cycling Susan Greenwood guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Adrianne Curry Adrianne Palicki Aisha Tyler Aki Ross Alecia Elliott
Low-sodium recipes Posted 1 day ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
Hi all --
Do any of you have a reliable site for good low-sodium recipes?
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Button tops final practice in Korea Posted 1 day ago by rovenlunger to rovenlunger's posterous
Jenson Button proved that McLaren's Friday pace was not down to the weather as he went quickest in the final practice session for the Korean Grand Prix at Yeongam The 2009 world champion initially hit the front with 23 minutes of the hour-long session to go in a time of 1m38.005s, but was knocked off the top spot by his team-mate Lewis Hamilton shortly afterwards.
Source: http://www.iracing.com/inracingnews/formula-one-news/f1-formula-one-news/butt...
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The impact of ecological limits on population growth Posted 1 day ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
Demographers are predicting that world population will climb to 10 billion this century. But with increasing pressure on water and food supplies will this projected population boom turn into a bust?
The hard part about predicting the future, someone once said, is that it hasn't happened yet. So it's a bit curious that so few experts question the received demographic wisdom that the Earth will be home to roughly 9 billion people in 2050 and a stable 10 billion at the century's end. Demographers seem comfortable projecting that life expectancy will keep rising while birth rates drift steadily downward, until human numbers hold steady with 3 billion more people than are alive today.
What's odd about this demographic forecast is how little it seems to square with environmental ones. There's little scientific dispute that the world is heading toward a warmer and harsher climate, less dependable water and energy supplies, less intact ecosystems with fewer species, more acidic oceans, and less naturally productive soils. Are we so smart and inventive that not one of these trends will have any impact on the number of human beings the planet sustains? When you put demographic projections side by side with environmental ones, the former actually mock the latter, suggesting that nothing in store for us will be more than an irritant. Human life will be less pleasant, perhaps, but it will never actually be threatened.
Some analysts, ranging from scientists David Pimentel of Cornell University to financial advisor and philanthropist Jeremy Grantham, dare to underline the possibility of a darker alternative future. Defying the
optimistic majority, they suggest that humanity long ago overshot a truly sustainable world population, implying that apocalyptic horsemen old and new could cause widespread death as the environment unravels. Most writers on environment and population are loathe to touch such predictions. But we should be asking, at least, whether such possibilities are real enough to temper the usual demographic confidence about future population projections.
For now, we can indeed be highly confident that world population will top 7 billion by the end of this year. We're close to that number already and currently adding about 216,000 people per day. But the United Nations "medium variant" population projection, the gold standard for expert expectation of the demographic future, takes a long leap of faith: It assumes no demographic influence from the coming environmental changes that could leave us living on what NASA climatologist James Hansen has dubbed "a different planet."
How different? Significantly warmer, according to the 2007 assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ? as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit more than today on average. Sea levels from two to six feet higher than today's ? vertically, meaning that seawater could move hundreds of feet inland over currently inhabited coastal land. Greater extremes of both severe droughts and intense storms. Shifting patterns of infectious disease as new landscapes open for pathogen survival and spread. Disruptions of global ecosystems as rising temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns buffet and scatter animal and plant species. The eventual melting of Himalayan glaciers, upsetting supplies of fresh water on which 1.3 billion South Asians and Chinese (and, of course, that number is rising) depend for food production.
And that's just climate change, based on the more dramatic end of the range the IPCC and other scientific groups project. Yet even if we leave aside the likelihood of a less accommodating climate, population growth itself undermines the basis for its own continuation in other ways. Since
1900, countries home to nearly half the world's people have moved into conditions of chronic water stress or scarcity based on falling per-capita supply of renewable fresh water. Levels of aquifers and even many lakes around the world are falling as a result. In a mere 14 years, based on median population projections, most of North Africa and the Middle East, plus Pakistan, South Africa and large parts of China and India, will be driven by water scarcity to increasing dependence on food imports "even at high levels of irrigation efficiency," according to the International Water Management Institute.
The world's net land under cultivation has scarcely expanded since 1960, with millions of acres of farmland gobbled by urban development while roughly equal amounts of less fertile land come under the plow. The doubling of humanity has cut the amount of cropland per person in half. And much of this essential asset is declining in quality as constant production saps nutrients that are critical to human health, while the soil itself erodes through the double whammy of rough weather and less-than-perfect human care. Fertilizer helps restore fertility (though rarely micronutrients), but at ever-higher prices and through massive inputs of non-renewable resources such as oil, natural gas, and key minerals. Phosphorus in particular is a non-renewable mineral essential to all life, yet it is being depleted and wasted at increasingly rapid rates, leading to fears of imminent "peak phosphorus."
We can recycle phosphorus, potassium, nitrogen, and other essential minerals and nutrients, but the number of people that even the most efficient recycling could support may be much less than today's world population. In 1997, Canadian geographer Vaclav Smil calculated that were it not for the industrial fixation of nitrogen, the world's population would probably not have exceeded 4 billion people ? 3 billion fewer than are alive today. It's likely that organic agriculture can feed many more people than it does currently, but the hard accounting of the nutrients in today's 7 billion human bodies, let alone tomorrow's projected 10 billion, challenges the hope that a climate-neutral agriculture system could feed us all.
Food production also requires many services of nature that conventional agronomy tends to ignore in projecting future food supplies, and the dependability of these services appears to be fraying. Roughly one out of every two or three forkfuls of food relies on natural pollination, yet many of the world's most important pollinators are in trouble. Honeybees are
succumbing to the tiny varroa mite, while vast numbers of bird species face threats ranging from habitat loss to housecats. Bats and countless other pest-eaters are falling prey to environmental insults scientists don't yet fully understand. And the loss of plant and animal biodiversity generally makes humanity ever-more dependent on a handful of key crop species and chemical inputs that make food production less, rather than more, resilient. One needn't argue that the rising grain prices, food riots, and famine parts of the world have experienced in the past few years are purely an outcome of population growth to worry that at some point further growth will be limited by constrained food supplies.
As population growth sends human beings into ecosystems that were once isolated, new disease vectors encounter the attraction of large packages of protoplasm that walk on two legs and can move anywhere on the planet within hours. In the last half-century, dozens of new infectious diseases have emerged. The most notable, HIV/AIDS, has led to some 25 million excess deaths, a megacity-sized number even in a world population of billions. In Lesotho, the pandemic pushed the death rate from 10 deaths per thousand people per year in the early 1990s to 18 per thousand a decade later. In South Africa the combination of falling fertility and HIV-related deaths has pressed down the population growth rate to 0.5 percent annually, half the rate of the United States. As the world's climate warms, the areas affected by such diseases will likely shift in unpredictable ways, with malarial and dengue-carrying mosquitoes moving into temporal zones while warming waters contribute to cholera outbreaks in areas once immune.
To be fair, the demographers who craft population projections are not actively judging that birth, death, and migration rates are immune to the effects of environmental change and natural resource scarcity. Rather they argue, reasonably enough, that there is no scientifically rigorous way to weigh the likelihood of such demographic impacts. So it makes more sense to simply extend current trend lines in population change ? rising life expectancy, falling fertility, higher proportions of people living in urban areas. These trends are then extrapolated into an assumedly surprise-free future. The well-known investor caveat that past performance is no guarantee of future results goes unstated in the conventional demographic forecast.
Is such a surprise-free future likely? That's a subjective question each of us must answer based on our own experience and hunches. Next to no research has assessed the likely impacts of human-caused climate change, ecosystem disruption, or energy and resource scarcity on the two main determinants of demographic change: births and deaths. Migration related to climate change is a more common subject for research, with projections ranging from 50 million to 1 billion people displaced by environmental factors ? including climate change ? by 2050. The mainstream projections cluster around 200 million, but no one argues that there is a compelling scientific argument for any of these numbers.
The IPCC and other climate-change authorities have noted that extremely hot weather can kill, with the elderly, immune-compromised, low-income, or socially isolated among the most vulnerable. An estimated 35,000 people died during the European heat wave of 2003. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cites research projecting that heat-related deaths could multiply as much as seven-fold by the century's end.
In the past few years, agronomists have lost some of their earlier confidence that food production, even with genetically modified crops, will keep pace with rising global populations in a changing climate. Already, weather-related disasters, from blistering heat waves to flooded farm fields, have contributed to widening gaps between food production and global consumption. The resulting price increases ? stoked also by biofuels production encouraged in part to slow climate change ? have led to food riots that cost lives and helped topple governments from the Middle East to Haiti.
If this is what we see a decade into the new century, what will unfold in the next 90 years? "What a horrible world it will be if food really becomes short from one year to the next," wheat physiologist Matthew Reynolds told The New York Times in June. "What will that do to society?" What, more specifically, will it do to life expectancy, fertility, and migration? Fundamentally, these questions are unanswerable from the vantage point of the present, and there's a lesson in this. We shouldn't be so confident that the demographers can expertly forecast what the world's population will look like beyond the next few years. A few demographers are willing to acknowledge this themselves.
"Continuing world population growth through mid-century seems nearly certain," University of California, Berkeley, demographer Ronald Lee noted recently in Science. "But nearly all population forecasts... implicitly assume that population growth will occur in a neutral zone without negative economic or environmental feedback. [Whether this occurs] will depend in part on the success of policy measures to reduce the environmental impact of economic and demographic growth."
It's certainly possible that ingenuity, resilience and effective governance will manage the stresses humanity faces in the decades ahead and will keep life expectancy growing in spite of them. Slashing per-capita energy and resource consumption would certainly help. A sustainable population size, it's worth adding, will be easier to maintain if societies also assure women the autonomy and contraceptive means they need to avoid unwanted pregnancies. For anyone paying attention to the science of climate change and the realities of a rapidly changing global environment, however, it seems foolish to treat projections of 10 billion people at the end of this century as respectfully as a prediction of a solar eclipse or the appearance of a well-studied comet. A bit more humility about population's path in an uncertain and dangerous century would be more consistent with the fact that the future, like a comet astronomers have never spotted, has not yet arrived. guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds America Ferrera Amerie Amy Cobb Amy Smart Ana Beatriz Barros
CUP: Charlotte Power Rankings Posted 1 day ago by rovenlunger to rovenlunger's posterous
Carl Edwards is now on top of the FOXSports.com/SPEED.com Power Rankings...
Source: http://nascar.speedtv.com/article/cup-charlotte-motor-speedway-power-rankings...
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Do energy prices make your blood boil? | Open thread Posted 1 day ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
Profit margins on typical tariffs have soared in recent months. Tell us your thoughts on the energy market ? and your bills
The average profit that big energy firms make out of dual-fuel customers has risen to ?125 per customer, up from ?15 in June , according to the regulator Ofgem, representing a 733% increase in just four months. Ofgem's chief executive, Alistair Buchanan, has expressed concern that the rise in margins highlights a continuing lack of competition in the area: "When consumers face energy bills at around ?1,345 they must have complete confidence that this price is set by companies competing in a fully competitive market. At the moment this is not the case."
We'd like to hear your experiences of paying energy bills. Do you think there's enough competition between providers? Is gas and electricity something you now use more carefully after prices have soared? Do you feel there's enough protection afforded to consumers? * Energy bills
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Kenny Wallace: 2012 Might Be My Last Season Driving In NASCAR Posted 1 day ago by rovenlunger to rovenlunger's posterous
Kenny Wallace - Photo Credit: Tom Pennington / Getty Images for NASCARKenny Wallace loves racing and plans to keep running dirt cars until he's 60 years old. But his time in NASCAR may not last much longer. Wallace said Wednesday at Charlotte Motor Speedway he's "exhausted trying to find money" from sponsors in what seems...more»
Source: http://www.catchfence.com/2011/nationwide/10/13/kenny-wallace-2012-might-be-m...
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Ray Aghayan obituary Posted 1 day ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
Award-winning costume designer who dressed Judy Garland and Diana Ross and oversaw the Oscar red carpet
Now that television talent contests are gussied up to Vegas standards, it's less easy to appreciate the discreet glamour that was the speciality of Ray Aghayan, who has died aged 83. But for 60 years, he guaranteed that difficult divas would arrive on screens and stages projecting perfection. Glamour was so much his habitat, he supervised over a dozen Oscar shows.
His initial diva, he remembered, was even more terrifying than Barbra Streisand: Princess Fawzia of Egypt, first wife of the last Shah of Iran, a woman of movie appearance and wilfulness. Aghayan came from an Armenian family in Tehran, and his widowed mother, Yasmine, designed clothes for the ruling Pahlavi family; the boy, starstruck by Hollywood, was certain he, too, could create, and the amused Fawzia summoned him via her ladies in waiting. She explained to him that she had to wear mourning dress, but didn't want to be extinguished by it. So he drew her "this big black tulle thing trimmed with droopy red ostrich feathers". It was sewn, defiantly worn, and after that no grand dame scared him.
His mother took his cinema passions seriously enough to send him to California to study. In Los Angeles, he dropped out of architecture and into acting, then: "I was directing a play and found we didn't have enough money to hire a designer. So I designed the costumes."
He went into television in the mid-50s, when most of its costuming was re-used from movie stock, or agency hires. NBC or CBS budgets for original commissions were reserved for big variety specials, and Aghayan was confident that whatever the level of luxe, he could supply it. It was steady work, culminating in 1963-64, when he costumed Judy Garland's regular shows. Edith Head had been commissioned, but exited, fast. Garland was trouble. But Aghayan was a fan ("If you can sing like that it doesn't matter how hard you are", he said), and her demands were minimal: she wanted to wear spike heels. As her legs were long and thin, Aghayan thought this was a great idea, and he was sure of the way she should look. "The lady was like the Statue of Liberty: you know what she wears." He defrumped Garland with slacks under over-blouses, simply cut but surface-decorated at $350 a time, to catch the light in monochrome. Garland wore them on her late tours, including the famous 1964 London Palladium gig.
Aghayan's success meant he needed assistance. It arrived at his door in the form of Bob Mackie, a young designer who sketched better than anyone and became Aghayan's professional and personal partner for life. They shared an aesthetic based on old Hollywood and burlesque ? fearless with feathers and rhinestones, but lightened up and styled for wit. Sometimes as a duo, sometimes solo, they produced costumes for Diana Ross in her Supremes days, Dinah Shore, Julie Andrews and Carol Channing ? the latter getting a Broadway gown with 80lb of crystal beading, its scarf so weighted that Channing, flinging it over her shoulder, damaged the scenery.
Aghayan never went as far into parody as Mackie, but he did enjoy pastiche in a short movie career, rebranding Doris Day in a mad mod mode for Caprice (1967). The terrible seriousness, and serious terribleness, of Doctor Doolittle (1967) put him off big films, although he and Mackie rallied to Ross and Streisand, picking up Oscar nominations for Lady Sings the Blues (1972) ? the shoulder treatments of Ross's dresses amplifying her slight frame to more closely match Billie Holiday's broader form ? and Streisand's Funny Lady (1975), the sequel to Funny Girl, a masterclass in bias cut. Aghayan alone had a nomination for Gaily, Gaily (1969), and among his Broadway productions was nominated for a Tony in 1970 for Applause, the musical of All About Eve: he draped rows of fringe from Lauren Bacall's loping frame, to dance in lieu of her feet.
Aghayan campaigned successfully for an Emmy category for costume, and he and Mackie shared the first award, in 1967, for a television movie of Alice Through the Looking Glass. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences still assumed that nothing on the box was purpose-made, however, and a member asked Aghayan what he did that was worth recognition, stating: "You shop for clothes and you bring it in and you put on stars and they wear it." Aghayan replied: "I want you, tomorrow, to go to the May Company [a department store] and buy me, and bring here, the Red Queen's costume."
He and Mackie were aware that the studio workrooms of trained craft hands were closing in LA; New York was a long way to go to get 10,000 sequins applied at speed. So in 1968, along with Elizabeth Courtney, formerly of Columbia Pictures, they set up their own Californian atelier, later exporting its output to Broadway. Many showbiz customers also wanted unique dress-up ensembles, at a time when Paris couture was low on handworked glamour. So the duo obliged, a custom-making venture that turned into retail collections in the 1980s. Mackie had the wow factor, Aghayan supplied the subtle flattery. The Costume Designers Guild executive director, Rachael Stanley, said: "Whenever there was a problem trying to make something work, Ray could come in and take a look at it and say, 'Oh, the problem is ...'" The guild gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2008.
Aghayan was asked to advise on the televising of the Oscar shows from the late 1960s. He didn't have a veto over red-carpet choices, but up until the mid-1980s, when couture houses began to fight to place their designs on stars' backs, his recommendation was heeded. By his last Oscars, in 2001, he felt costume design ? the dress as character or an extra asset on a charismatic performer ? had been overtaken by fashion advertising.
He won an Emmy and several nominations for the Oscar shows, and designed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 LA Olympics, with 50 designs mass-produced into 11,000 outfits of white sportswear: happy, summery, the summation of his fantasy America.
Mackie survives him.
? Ray Aghayan, costume designer, born 28 July 1928; died 10 October 2011 * Oscars
* Awards and prizes
* Emmys
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* United States Veronica Horwell guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds January Jones Jennie Finch Jennifer Aniston Jennifer Gareis Jennifer Garner
2013 Porsche Boxster Spied Undisguised: Sleeker, Lighter, No Hybrid, Possible Turbo Four Posted 1 day ago by rovenlunger to rovenlunger's posterous
Sleeker styling and a four-cylinder engine for Porsche?s sublime roadster. The latest 911 has been revealed, and the third-gen Boxster will be Porsche?s next big debut. The mid-engined roadster is, after all, a close sibling to the iconic 911, although Porsche has certainly learned to hide the connection a bit better than with the pre-2002 [...]
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/caranddriver/blog/~3/BiRdvTIVHCE/2013_porsche_...
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Blackpool's 'gag pile carpet' unfurled Posted 1 day ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
It contains the catchphrases from some of the best-loved comedians and has been likened to the Angel of the North - but horizontal.
On a rainy and windswept October day, the comedian Ken Dodd unveiled a comedy carpet in Blackpool.
The carpet - made of granite and concrete - features catchphrases and jokes from hundreds of famous comedians, including Dodd, Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper and Morecambe and Wise. It was constructed beneath Blackpool Tower.
Officials in Blackpool likened it to the Angel of the North - but horizontal. The larger catchphrases can be seen from the top of the tower that looms above it.
The 2,200m square installation features 160,000 individually cut letters spelling out the famous one liners. The ?4m project has taken five years from conception to installation.
Some of the catchphrases and jokes include: "I had a ploughman's lunch the other day. He wasn't half mad."
The artist Gordon Young said: "I'd been looking at photographs of stars and the Blackpool Tower was a recurring backdrop to the photos ? Eric and Ernie in deck chairs, Ken Dodd, Les Dawson.
"It soon became obvious that Blackpool had been a magnetic chuckle point for the nation."
As Dodd unveiled the carpet, he exclaimed: "By jove missus, what a beautiful day!"
You can see more images of the comedy carpet here.
The Blackpool Gazette has a video of the launch. The news report contains the immortal line:
"They talk about the Hollywood Walk of Fame - but no-one else has one of these!"
Ken Dodd has performed in the resort every year since 1954. He told the Blackpool Gazette: "I think it's going to be visited by millions. The people of the north love to laugh, above anything else.
"Blackpool is the greatest show town in the world."
But my favourite headline goes to the Yorkshire Post which described the launch as a "gag pile carpet".
* Blackpool
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* Comedy Helen Carter guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Dania Ramirez Danica Patrick Daniella Alonso Danneel Harris Deanna Russo
Dodge Motorsports, 2011 NSCS Bank of America 500 Post-Race Recaps Posted 1 day ago by rovenlunger to rovenlunger's posterous
Dodge MotorsportsKURT BUSCH (No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ultra Dodge Charger R/T) Finished 13th ?It was just a frustrating night for our Shell/Pennzoil Dodge. I thought we had the lucky dog there about halfway through the race. We were just tight in and loose off all night. And we got bit twice when the caution came out...more»
Source: http://www.catchfence.com/2011/sprintcup/10/16/dodge-motorsports-2011-nscs-ba...
Max Jean Stefan Johansson Eddie Johnson Leslie Johnson Bruce Johnstone
Calling time on the curry house Posted 1 day ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
The term 'curry house' is a lazy lumping together of some wonderfully diverse culinary traditions and it's time we moved on, says Sejal Sukhadwala
Just in case there aren't enough PR-led themed events going on this month ? the London Restaurant Festival, the London Cocktail Week and Chocolate Week - it seems we're also at the beginning of National Curry Week , just a couple of weeks before Diwali .
As it's one of the nation's favourite cuisines, I don't know whether we need an annual celebration of "over 200 years of Indian restaurants in the UK", but at least this has a commendable aim of raising funds for hunger- and poverty-related charities. But I found myself irritated with the website's calls for curry lovers "to get out and visit their local curry houses". It's a term I loathe.
I have no idea where it originates - perhaps someone dreamt it up after Sake Dean Mahomed set up the Hindoostane Coffee House in 1810 , widely regarded as the UK's first Indian restaurant. Wherever it comes from, it never fails to irk me when it's bandied around as a catch-all - it does no justice to the hugely complex and diverse regional cooking of India, never mind Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. "Curry house" lazily lumps all these cuisines together; it's as ignorant and twee as labelling the different cuisines of Europe "continental".
To me, the outmoded phrase evokes 70s and 80s restaurants with flock wallpaper, piped music, obsequious waiters in bow ties and greasy glow-in-the-dark curries. It belongs to the era before sun-dried tomatoes and mobile phones were commonplace, when ginger and garlic were considered e
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Subject: Your Daily Posterous Spaces Update
Your Daily Posterous Spaces Update October 18th, 2011
Mountain biking in Canada Posted 2 days ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
For a mountain biking break you can't do better than the stunning terrain of British Columbia, the sport's spiritual home
"I thought we'd start with Thirsty Beaver, definitely take in Steam Donkey and Space Nugget, and perhaps if there's time we can check out Bucket of Blood. Did you bring your dodgeballs?"
Hauling his mountain bike out of the back of his truck, guide Mike Manara set off through the steaming Canadian drizzle towards the first creek crossing of the day, leaving me desperately searching for my ? how can I put this ? balls. I would find these homemade cakes much later on, gently oozing chocolate and peanuts between the bike tools in my backpack, a casualty of being thrown around a network of trails the collective naming of which sounded more like the latter stages of some gruesome illness than a fun day out on a bike.
"Nine years ago there were no riders in Cumberland," said Mike over lunch, a hastily arranged tree stump picnic stop well away from the bear poo we had spotted earlier. "But now the car park at the rec centre is full every weekend with people coming to mountain bike and that's great."
It's not an overstatement to say that British Columbia is mountain biking. The region on Canada's west coast has passionately nurtured both the sport's champions and its evolution, even giving the name to a particular genre of riding known as "north shore" (elevated wooden trails which act as bridges and launches for jumps), which was born on the northern shore of Vancouver's harbour. Travel up the Sea to Sky highway for 70 miles and you reach the behemoth of Whistler, a mountain resort which has invested so enthusiastically in its mountain biking infrastructure that it attracts 250,000 people a year into its purpose-built park and trails.
Cumberland lacks all of Whistler's sass and advertising savvy, an acute failing about which the small town is entirely unconcerned. It lies on Vancouver Island's east coast in an area known as the Comox Valley, 25 minutes south of Mount Washington ? another major outdoor sports destination.
From its founding in 1888 until its mines closed in 1966, Cumberland was a busy coal-producing town ? complete with bitter labour disputes and a reputation for hard living among its inhabitants which earned it the nickname Dodge City.
It is on this industrial heritage that the United Riders of Cumberland have gradually developed a network of trails, utilising the old logging tracks ? on Steam Donkey you can even feel the old sleepers underneath your wheels ? which surround the town.
"When I arrived 10 years ago there was nothing," said Jeremy Grasby, whose opening of the Riding Fool Hostel spearheaded Cumberland's transformation from dying community into sporting destination. "I mean, we're talking tumbleweed blowing across the street, you know?
"I don't know why I came here. I just love mountain biking and I love mountain bikers so it seemed to make sense. I had no grand plan, just open the place and see how it goes."
The hostel took over a 19th-century building that had for three generations been a hardware store belonging to CH Tarbell and sons, the original signage for which now hangs in the living room. Lodgers are diverse: we entered to find a chairlift operator at Mount Washington, full of youthful seasonaire glee, sitting on one sofa, while poring over a map were three fortysomethings pondering whether their UK-honed cycling skills were going to be enough for the terrain. Bikes stood in the hallway ? the Dodge City Cycles (dodgecitycycles.com ) shop shares the building and mountain bike magazines were weighing down most of the tables. The hostel works in conjunction with Island Mountain Rides to organise guided rides for visitors both in the immediate area and further afield. It's fair to say that two wheels rule at the Riding Fool.
Most of the trails ? many of which you can ride straight from the hostel's front door ? are single track, hand built by people living locally, giving each one a story and a character of its own. Thirsty Beaver weaved through wet, lush forest, the creation of a group known as the River Rats ? chaps on the mature side of 50 with time on their hands and a love of carpentry, hence the beaver totempoles which dot the route and the expansive use of wooden bridges.
Three hours after surviving Bucket of Blood (a tree? a corner? oh no!), we were propping up the bar at the Waverley Hotel, where Pink Floyd tribute band the Pigs were inching their way through Dark Side of the Moon. The ceiling was pockmarked with wine corks and dry ice curled around the bike that swung gently from the rafters. Behind the bar was a glass door leading to the walk-in refrigerator which also served the off?licence next door.
Cumberland's main street, Dunsmuir Avenue, plays host to an eclectic mix of businesses from coffee shops and tattoo parlours to organic bakeries and vintage clothing stores. It's all a far cry from the adventurous terrain which surrounds the town and the rowdy history which the modern incarnation has inherited.
The following day Mike decided we needed to explore the riding in Strathcona Provincial Park , up on the Forbidden Plateau, so called because of the legend of the disappearance of women and children from the Comox tribe who were hiding there to escape raiders. It was a long and dusty slog to the start of the trails, but as we ascended, the view over to the mainland dulled the pain enough to suspend the use of bad language. We were heading for a trail named Cabin Fever which, as soon as we turned off from the fireroad ascent, was nothing short of extraordinary. Cresting bare rock outcrops with wide open vistas, we dived into dappled forest runs ending on tight, sandy corners twisting through low shrubbery. We rode back to Mike's truck on Bear Bait, a brilliantly mischievous trail which ducked over and under splayed tree roots, suitable for any rider with a sense of fun.
"I think you've earned a Lucky," said Mike before dumping a 15-can pack of Lucky Lager on the truck bed. Such is the enthusiasm with which the residents of Cumberland consume this brand of lager that it was named the Luckiest town in Canada in 2002 with more cans sold there than anywhere else in the country. Not bad going for a population of 2,800 people.
"There has been mountain biking here since mountain biking began," said Jeremy later. "I guess we are lucky ? the riding is phenomenal but we also have that smalltown community feel. There's everything you need."
And you're going to need those dodgeballs.
? The Riding Fool Hostel (2705 Dunsmuir, +1 250 336 8250, ridingfool.com) has dorm beds for C$25.75pp (?15) and doubles for ?45. Island Mountain Rides (islandmountainrides.com ) runs half?day tours from ?45pp and full?day epic rides from ?60pp. For more information, visit britishcolumbia.travel * Cycling holidays
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* Cycling Susan Greenwood guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Adrianne Curry Adrianne Palicki Aisha Tyler Aki Ross Alecia Elliott
Low-sodium recipes Posted 1 day ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
Hi all --
Do any of you have a reliable site for good low-sodium recipes?
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Button tops final practice in Korea Posted 1 day ago by rovenlunger to rovenlunger's posterous
Jenson Button proved that McLaren's Friday pace was not down to the weather as he went quickest in the final practice session for the Korean Grand Prix at Yeongam The 2009 world champion initially hit the front with 23 minutes of the hour-long session to go in a time of 1m38.005s, but was knocked off the top spot by his team-mate Lewis Hamilton shortly afterwards.
Source: http://www.iracing.com/inracingnews/formula-one-news/f1-formula-one-news/butt...
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The impact of ecological limits on population growth Posted 1 day ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
Demographers are predicting that world population will climb to 10 billion this century. But with increasing pressure on water and food supplies will this projected population boom turn into a bust?
The hard part about predicting the future, someone once said, is that it hasn't happened yet. So it's a bit curious that so few experts question the received demographic wisdom that the Earth will be home to roughly 9 billion people in 2050 and a stable 10 billion at the century's end. Demographers seem comfortable projecting that life expectancy will keep rising while birth rates drift steadily downward, until human numbers hold steady with 3 billion more people than are alive today.
What's odd about this demographic forecast is how little it seems to square with environmental ones. There's little scientific dispute that the world is heading toward a warmer and harsher climate, less dependable water and energy supplies, less intact ecosystems with fewer species, more acidic oceans, and less naturally productive soils. Are we so smart and inventive that not one of these trends will have any impact on the number of human beings the planet sustains? When you put demographic projections side by side with environmental ones, the former actually mock the latter, suggesting that nothing in store for us will be more than an irritant. Human life will be less pleasant, perhaps, but it will never actually be threatened.
Some analysts, ranging from scientists David Pimentel of Cornell University to financial advisor and philanthropist Jeremy Grantham, dare to underline the possibility of a darker alternative future. Defying the
optimistic majority, they suggest that humanity long ago overshot a truly sustainable world population, implying that apocalyptic horsemen old and new could cause widespread death as the environment unravels. Most writers on environment and population are loathe to touch such predictions. But we should be asking, at least, whether such possibilities are real enough to temper the usual demographic confidence about future population projections.
For now, we can indeed be highly confident that world population will top 7 billion by the end of this year. We're close to that number already and currently adding about 216,000 people per day. But the United Nations "medium variant" population projection, the gold standard for expert expectation of the demographic future, takes a long leap of faith: It assumes no demographic influence from the coming environmental changes that could leave us living on what NASA climatologist James Hansen has dubbed "a different planet."
How different? Significantly warmer, according to the 2007 assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ? as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit more than today on average. Sea levels from two to six feet higher than today's ? vertically, meaning that seawater could move hundreds of feet inland over currently inhabited coastal land. Greater extremes of both severe droughts and intense storms. Shifting patterns of infectious disease as new landscapes open for pathogen survival and spread. Disruptions of global ecosystems as rising temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns buffet and scatter animal and plant species. The eventual melting of Himalayan glaciers, upsetting supplies of fresh water on which 1.3 billion South Asians and Chinese (and, of course, that number is rising) depend for food production.
And that's just climate change, based on the more dramatic end of the range the IPCC and other scientific groups project. Yet even if we leave aside the likelihood of a less accommodating climate, population growth itself undermines the basis for its own continuation in other ways. Since
1900, countries home to nearly half the world's people have moved into conditions of chronic water stress or scarcity based on falling per-capita supply of renewable fresh water. Levels of aquifers and even many lakes around the world are falling as a result. In a mere 14 years, based on median population projections, most of North Africa and the Middle East, plus Pakistan, South Africa and large parts of China and India, will be driven by water scarcity to increasing dependence on food imports "even at high levels of irrigation efficiency," according to the International Water Management Institute.
The world's net land under cultivation has scarcely expanded since 1960, with millions of acres of farmland gobbled by urban development while roughly equal amounts of less fertile land come under the plow. The doubling of humanity has cut the amount of cropland per person in half. And much of this essential asset is declining in quality as constant production saps nutrients that are critical to human health, while the soil itself erodes through the double whammy of rough weather and less-than-perfect human care. Fertilizer helps restore fertility (though rarely micronutrients), but at ever-higher prices and through massive inputs of non-renewable resources such as oil, natural gas, and key minerals. Phosphorus in particular is a non-renewable mineral essential to all life, yet it is being depleted and wasted at increasingly rapid rates, leading to fears of imminent "peak phosphorus."
We can recycle phosphorus, potassium, nitrogen, and other essential minerals and nutrients, but the number of people that even the most efficient recycling could support may be much less than today's world population. In 1997, Canadian geographer Vaclav Smil calculated that were it not for the industrial fixation of nitrogen, the world's population would probably not have exceeded 4 billion people ? 3 billion fewer than are alive today. It's likely that organic agriculture can feed many more people than it does currently, but the hard accounting of the nutrients in today's 7 billion human bodies, let alone tomorrow's projected 10 billion, challenges the hope that a climate-neutral agriculture system could feed us all.
Food production also requires many services of nature that conventional agronomy tends to ignore in projecting future food supplies, and the dependability of these services appears to be fraying. Roughly one out of every two or three forkfuls of food relies on natural pollination, yet many of the world's most important pollinators are in trouble. Honeybees are
succumbing to the tiny varroa mite, while vast numbers of bird species face threats ranging from habitat loss to housecats. Bats and countless other pest-eaters are falling prey to environmental insults scientists don't yet fully understand. And the loss of plant and animal biodiversity generally makes humanity ever-more dependent on a handful of key crop species and chemical inputs that make food production less, rather than more, resilient. One needn't argue that the rising grain prices, food riots, and famine parts of the world have experienced in the past few years are purely an outcome of population growth to worry that at some point further growth will be limited by constrained food supplies.
As population growth sends human beings into ecosystems that were once isolated, new disease vectors encounter the attraction of large packages of protoplasm that walk on two legs and can move anywhere on the planet within hours. In the last half-century, dozens of new infectious diseases have emerged. The most notable, HIV/AIDS, has led to some 25 million excess deaths, a megacity-sized number even in a world population of billions. In Lesotho, the pandemic pushed the death rate from 10 deaths per thousand people per year in the early 1990s to 18 per thousand a decade later. In South Africa the combination of falling fertility and HIV-related deaths has pressed down the population growth rate to 0.5 percent annually, half the rate of the United States. As the world's climate warms, the areas affected by such diseases will likely shift in unpredictable ways, with malarial and dengue-carrying mosquitoes moving into temporal zones while warming waters contribute to cholera outbreaks in areas once immune.
To be fair, the demographers who craft population projections are not actively judging that birth, death, and migration rates are immune to the effects of environmental change and natural resource scarcity. Rather they argue, reasonably enough, that there is no scientifically rigorous way to weigh the likelihood of such demographic impacts. So it makes more sense to simply extend current trend lines in population change ? rising life expectancy, falling fertility, higher proportions of people living in urban areas. These trends are then extrapolated into an assumedly surprise-free future. The well-known investor caveat that past performance is no guarantee of future results goes unstated in the conventional demographic forecast.
Is such a surprise-free future likely? That's a subjective question each of us must answer based on our own experience and hunches. Next to no research has assessed the likely impacts of human-caused climate change, ecosystem disruption, or energy and resource scarcity on the two main determinants of demographic change: births and deaths. Migration related to climate change is a more common subject for research, with projections ranging from 50 million to 1 billion people displaced by environmental factors ? including climate change ? by 2050. The mainstream projections cluster around 200 million, but no one argues that there is a compelling scientific argument for any of these numbers.
The IPCC and other climate-change authorities have noted that extremely hot weather can kill, with the elderly, immune-compromised, low-income, or socially isolated among the most vulnerable. An estimated 35,000 people died during the European heat wave of 2003. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cites research projecting that heat-related deaths could multiply as much as seven-fold by the century's end.
In the past few years, agronomists have lost some of their earlier confidence that food production, even with genetically modified crops, will keep pace with rising global populations in a changing climate. Already, weather-related disasters, from blistering heat waves to flooded farm fields, have contributed to widening gaps between food production and global consumption. The resulting price increases ? stoked also by biofuels production encouraged in part to slow climate change ? have led to food riots that cost lives and helped topple governments from the Middle East to Haiti.
If this is what we see a decade into the new century, what will unfold in the next 90 years? "What a horrible world it will be if food really becomes short from one year to the next," wheat physiologist Matthew Reynolds told The New York Times in June. "What will that do to society?" What, more specifically, will it do to life expectancy, fertility, and migration? Fundamentally, these questions are unanswerable from the vantage point of the present, and there's a lesson in this. We shouldn't be so confident that the demographers can expertly forecast what the world's population will look like beyond the next few years. A few demographers are willing to acknowledge this themselves.
"Continuing world population growth through mid-century seems nearly certain," University of California, Berkeley, demographer Ronald Lee noted recently in Science. "But nearly all population forecasts... implicitly assume that population growth will occur in a neutral zone without negative economic or environmental feedback. [Whether this occurs] will depend in part on the success of policy measures to reduce the environmental impact of economic and demographic growth."
It's certainly possible that ingenuity, resilience and effective governance will manage the stresses humanity faces in the decades ahead and will keep life expectancy growing in spite of them. Slashing per-capita energy and resource consumption would certainly help. A sustainable population size, it's worth adding, will be easier to maintain if societies also assure women the autonomy and contraceptive means they need to avoid unwanted pregnancies. For anyone paying attention to the science of climate change and the realities of a rapidly changing global environment, however, it seems foolish to treat projections of 10 billion people at the end of this century as respectfully as a prediction of a solar eclipse or the appearance of a well-studied comet. A bit more humility about population's path in an uncertain and dangerous century would be more consistent with the fact that the future, like a comet astronomers have never spotted, has not yet arrived. guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds America Ferrera Amerie Amy Cobb Amy Smart Ana Beatriz Barros
CUP: Charlotte Power Rankings Posted 1 day ago by rovenlunger to rovenlunger's posterous
Carl Edwards is now on top of the FOXSports.com/SPEED.com Power Rankings...
Source: http://nascar.speedtv.com/article/cup-charlotte-motor-speedway-power-rankings...
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Do energy prices make your blood boil? | Open thread Posted 1 day ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
Profit margins on typical tariffs have soared in recent months. Tell us your thoughts on the energy market ? and your bills
The average profit that big energy firms make out of dual-fuel customers has risen to ?125 per customer, up from ?15 in June , according to the regulator Ofgem, representing a 733% increase in just four months. Ofgem's chief executive, Alistair Buchanan, has expressed concern that the rise in margins highlights a continuing lack of competition in the area: "When consumers face energy bills at around ?1,345 they must have complete confidence that this price is set by companies competing in a fully competitive market. At the moment this is not the case."
We'd like to hear your experiences of paying energy bills. Do you think there's enough competition between providers? Is gas and electricity something you now use more carefully after prices have soared? Do you feel there's enough protection afforded to consumers? * Energy bills
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Kenny Wallace: 2012 Might Be My Last Season Driving In NASCAR Posted 1 day ago by rovenlunger to rovenlunger's posterous
Kenny Wallace - Photo Credit: Tom Pennington / Getty Images for NASCARKenny Wallace loves racing and plans to keep running dirt cars until he's 60 years old. But his time in NASCAR may not last much longer. Wallace said Wednesday at Charlotte Motor Speedway he's "exhausted trying to find money" from sponsors in what seems...more»
Source: http://www.catchfence.com/2011/nationwide/10/13/kenny-wallace-2012-might-be-m...
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Ray Aghayan obituary Posted 1 day ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
Award-winning costume designer who dressed Judy Garland and Diana Ross and oversaw the Oscar red carpet
Now that television talent contests are gussied up to Vegas standards, it's less easy to appreciate the discreet glamour that was the speciality of Ray Aghayan, who has died aged 83. But for 60 years, he guaranteed that difficult divas would arrive on screens and stages projecting perfection. Glamour was so much his habitat, he supervised over a dozen Oscar shows.
His initial diva, he remembered, was even more terrifying than Barbra Streisand: Princess Fawzia of Egypt, first wife of the last Shah of Iran, a woman of movie appearance and wilfulness. Aghayan came from an Armenian family in Tehran, and his widowed mother, Yasmine, designed clothes for the ruling Pahlavi family; the boy, starstruck by Hollywood, was certain he, too, could create, and the amused Fawzia summoned him via her ladies in waiting. She explained to him that she had to wear mourning dress, but didn't want to be extinguished by it. So he drew her "this big black tulle thing trimmed with droopy red ostrich feathers". It was sewn, defiantly worn, and after that no grand dame scared him.
His mother took his cinema passions seriously enough to send him to California to study. In Los Angeles, he dropped out of architecture and into acting, then: "I was directing a play and found we didn't have enough money to hire a designer. So I designed the costumes."
He went into television in the mid-50s, when most of its costuming was re-used from movie stock, or agency hires. NBC or CBS budgets for original commissions were reserved for big variety specials, and Aghayan was confident that whatever the level of luxe, he could supply it. It was steady work, culminating in 1963-64, when he costumed Judy Garland's regular shows. Edith Head had been commissioned, but exited, fast. Garland was trouble. But Aghayan was a fan ("If you can sing like that it doesn't matter how hard you are", he said), and her demands were minimal: she wanted to wear spike heels. As her legs were long and thin, Aghayan thought this was a great idea, and he was sure of the way she should look. "The lady was like the Statue of Liberty: you know what she wears." He defrumped Garland with slacks under over-blouses, simply cut but surface-decorated at $350 a time, to catch the light in monochrome. Garland wore them on her late tours, including the famous 1964 London Palladium gig.
Aghayan's success meant he needed assistance. It arrived at his door in the form of Bob Mackie, a young designer who sketched better than anyone and became Aghayan's professional and personal partner for life. They shared an aesthetic based on old Hollywood and burlesque ? fearless with feathers and rhinestones, but lightened up and styled for wit. Sometimes as a duo, sometimes solo, they produced costumes for Diana Ross in her Supremes days, Dinah Shore, Julie Andrews and Carol Channing ? the latter getting a Broadway gown with 80lb of crystal beading, its scarf so weighted that Channing, flinging it over her shoulder, damaged the scenery.
Aghayan never went as far into parody as Mackie, but he did enjoy pastiche in a short movie career, rebranding Doris Day in a mad mod mode for Caprice (1967). The terrible seriousness, and serious terribleness, of Doctor Doolittle (1967) put him off big films, although he and Mackie rallied to Ross and Streisand, picking up Oscar nominations for Lady Sings the Blues (1972) ? the shoulder treatments of Ross's dresses amplifying her slight frame to more closely match Billie Holiday's broader form ? and Streisand's Funny Lady (1975), the sequel to Funny Girl, a masterclass in bias cut. Aghayan alone had a nomination for Gaily, Gaily (1969), and among his Broadway productions was nominated for a Tony in 1970 for Applause, the musical of All About Eve: he draped rows of fringe from Lauren Bacall's loping frame, to dance in lieu of her feet.
Aghayan campaigned successfully for an Emmy category for costume, and he and Mackie shared the first award, in 1967, for a television movie of Alice Through the Looking Glass. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences still assumed that nothing on the box was purpose-made, however, and a member asked Aghayan what he did that was worth recognition, stating: "You shop for clothes and you bring it in and you put on stars and they wear it." Aghayan replied: "I want you, tomorrow, to go to the May Company [a department store] and buy me, and bring here, the Red Queen's costume."
He and Mackie were aware that the studio workrooms of trained craft hands were closing in LA; New York was a long way to go to get 10,000 sequins applied at speed. So in 1968, along with Elizabeth Courtney, formerly of Columbia Pictures, they set up their own Californian atelier, later exporting its output to Broadway. Many showbiz customers also wanted unique dress-up ensembles, at a time when Paris couture was low on handworked glamour. So the duo obliged, a custom-making venture that turned into retail collections in the 1980s. Mackie had the wow factor, Aghayan supplied the subtle flattery. The Costume Designers Guild executive director, Rachael Stanley, said: "Whenever there was a problem trying to make something work, Ray could come in and take a look at it and say, 'Oh, the problem is ...'" The guild gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2008.
Aghayan was asked to advise on the televising of the Oscar shows from the late 1960s. He didn't have a veto over red-carpet choices, but up until the mid-1980s, when couture houses began to fight to place their designs on stars' backs, his recommendation was heeded. By his last Oscars, in 2001, he felt costume design ? the dress as character or an extra asset on a charismatic performer ? had been overtaken by fashion advertising.
He won an Emmy and several nominations for the Oscar shows, and designed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 LA Olympics, with 50 designs mass-produced into 11,000 outfits of white sportswear: happy, summery, the summation of his fantasy America.
Mackie survives him.
? Ray Aghayan, costume designer, born 28 July 1928; died 10 October 2011 * Oscars
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* United States Veronica Horwell guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds January Jones Jennie Finch Jennifer Aniston Jennifer Gareis Jennifer Garner
2013 Porsche Boxster Spied Undisguised: Sleeker, Lighter, No Hybrid, Possible Turbo Four Posted 1 day ago by rovenlunger to rovenlunger's posterous
Sleeker styling and a four-cylinder engine for Porsche?s sublime roadster. The latest 911 has been revealed, and the third-gen Boxster will be Porsche?s next big debut. The mid-engined roadster is, after all, a close sibling to the iconic 911, although Porsche has certainly learned to hide the connection a bit better than with the pre-2002 [...]
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/caranddriver/blog/~3/BiRdvTIVHCE/2013_porsche_...
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Blackpool's 'gag pile carpet' unfurled Posted 1 day ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
It contains the catchphrases from some of the best-loved comedians and has been likened to the Angel of the North - but horizontal.
On a rainy and windswept October day, the comedian Ken Dodd unveiled a comedy carpet in Blackpool.
The carpet - made of granite and concrete - features catchphrases and jokes from hundreds of famous comedians, including Dodd, Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper and Morecambe and Wise. It was constructed beneath Blackpool Tower.
Officials in Blackpool likened it to the Angel of the North - but horizontal. The larger catchphrases can be seen from the top of the tower that looms above it.
The 2,200m square installation features 160,000 individually cut letters spelling out the famous one liners. The ?4m project has taken five years from conception to installation.
Some of the catchphrases and jokes include: "I had a ploughman's lunch the other day. He wasn't half mad."
The artist Gordon Young said: "I'd been looking at photographs of stars and the Blackpool Tower was a recurring backdrop to the photos ? Eric and Ernie in deck chairs, Ken Dodd, Les Dawson.
"It soon became obvious that Blackpool had been a magnetic chuckle point for the nation."
As Dodd unveiled the carpet, he exclaimed: "By jove missus, what a beautiful day!"
You can see more images of the comedy carpet here.
The Blackpool Gazette has a video of the launch. The news report contains the immortal line:
"They talk about the Hollywood Walk of Fame - but no-one else has one of these!"
Ken Dodd has performed in the resort every year since 1954. He told the Blackpool Gazette: "I think it's going to be visited by millions. The people of the north love to laugh, above anything else.
"Blackpool is the greatest show town in the world."
But my favourite headline goes to the Yorkshire Post which described the launch as a "gag pile carpet".
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Dodge Motorsports, 2011 NSCS Bank of America 500 Post-Race Recaps Posted 1 day ago by rovenlunger to rovenlunger's posterous
Dodge MotorsportsKURT BUSCH (No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ultra Dodge Charger R/T) Finished 13th ?It was just a frustrating night for our Shell/Pennzoil Dodge. I thought we had the lucky dog there about halfway through the race. We were just tight in and loose off all night. And we got bit twice when the caution came out...more»
Source: http://www.catchfence.com/2011/sprintcup/10/16/dodge-motorsports-2011-nscs-ba...
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Calling time on the curry house Posted 1 day ago by kimtopps to kimtopps's posterous
The term 'curry house' is a lazy lumping together of some wonderfully diverse culinary traditions and it's time we moved on, says Sejal Sukhadwala
Just in case there aren't enough PR-led themed events going on this month ? the London Restaurant Festival, the London Cocktail Week and Chocolate Week - it seems we're also at the beginning of National Curry Week , just a couple of weeks before Diwali .
As it's one of the nation's favourite cuisines, I don't know whether we need an annual celebration of "over 200 years of Indian restaurants in the UK", but at least this has a commendable aim of raising funds for hunger- and poverty-related charities. But I found myself irritated with the website's calls for curry lovers "to get out and visit their local curry houses". It's a term I loathe.
I have no idea where it originates - perhaps someone dreamt it up after Sake Dean Mahomed set up the Hindoostane Coffee House in 1810 , widely regarded as the UK's first Indian restaurant. Wherever it comes from, it never fails to irk me when it's bandied around as a catch-all - it does no justice to the hugely complex and diverse regional cooking of India, never mind Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. "Curry house" lazily lumps all these cuisines together; it's as ignorant and twee as labelling the different cuisines of Europe "continental".
To me, the outmoded phrase evokes 70s and 80s restaurants with flock wallpaper, piped music, obsequious waiters in bow ties and greasy glow-in-the-dark curries. It belongs to the era before sun-dried tomatoes and mobile phones were commonplace, when ginger and garlic were considered e
